Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Parry and Rebecca Foon ‘First Sounds’

First Sounds, out November 1st via Envision Records in North America and One Little Independent in the UK and the rest of the world, is the debut album from a trio made-up of cellist Rebecca Foon, violinist Sarah Neufeld and multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry. The group originally met in Montreal, Quebec, during the late 1990s while independently finding their footing in the local arts and culture community. For two years, Rebecca, Sarah and Richard collaborated in various capacities before embarking on their respective musical careers.
 
The LP collects nine compositions, with dynamic minimalism, sweeping crescendos and rich harmonies. The expressive instrumentation, experimental undertones, and ambient textures are crafted with expert musicianship and technical symbiosis. Richard Reed Parry explains; “In Montreal, October 1999, the three of us played music with each other for the first time. As we began to improvise together, we felt a shared, wordless musical language emerge right away, somehow intuitive and familiar from the very start.
 
We experimented and played together often at that time – Montreal was and still is a very creative and multi-faceted artistic hive of activity. The musical chemistry we found together was formative in each of the bands we went on to form and musical collaborations we pursued, but we never made a recording of our original trio and its unique, intimate and explorative sound.
 
Decades of friendship and many bands later, in the heart of the first pandemic winter the three of us got together in a room and made our first album as an ensemble. Picking up exactly where we left off years earlier, we began fashioning compositions that immediately tapped into the same musical language we had discovered between us so many years earlier.
 
‘Maria’ is the first single from our first album and features our friend Shahzad Ismaily on percussion. The melody was inspired by an old handmade recording on reel-to-reel tape that came with a tape recorder I bought, it had very slowed down/half speed voices singing hymns on it, but the recording was so slow and distorted you couldn’t really tell what they were singing. So, the tune sort of felt like a hymn-like invocation.”
 
Of the video for new single ‘Maria’, director Jason Last says; “Recording and observing nature in Catalonia, Spain, I wanted to capture the cyclical and intricate nature of the sound through elements of light, touch, and the movement of my own body as I shot for each 5-minute take. Connecting my body and the subjects that I shot.”
 
Richard and Sarah’s musical careers have been deeply intertwined over the past twenty years; best known for their involvement in Grammy-award winning indie-rock group Arcade Fire, and recently revitalized instrumental outfit and Juno-award winning Bell Orchestre, both musicians have spent the better part of the past two decades writing and releasing music and touring the globe.
 
Similarly, composer and cellist Rebecca Foon has been a fixture of the Montreal music community for two decades, performing and recording in a wide array of contexts, most notably as co-founder of the modern chamber post-rock ensemble Esmerine, as a member of Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra (2001-2008) and Set Fire To Flames (2001-2004), and more recently at the helm of her electro-acoustic songwriting project Saltland. With these four entities, Foon has performed around the world and released over a dozen albums on various imprints. Esmerine’s 2013 album Dalmak won the Canadian music industry’s Juno Award for Best Instrumental Album and the band’s 2015 album Lost Voices was a finalist in this same category, along with winning the award for Best Album Package.
 

While each of the members have crossed paths in different and unique ways over the years, they have never truly collaborated as equal partners. Moreover, they have always felt as though the connection they shared as a trio – both as friends and musical collaborators was special and everlasting. And so, 25 years later, the trio are reuniting to pick-up where they left off. This time, with the wind at their backs.
 
First Sounds, like many before it, is a product and project of the global COVID pandemic. Sarah, Richard, and Rebecca, who are normally accustomed to touring the world, were suddenly grounded in Montreal. As a result, they started spending time together in the very place the friends initially met over two decades ago, this triggered a variety of memories. “It is as though we are watching our earlier years on replay (the places we used to hang out, the people we used to know), while simultaneously living in the present day.”
 
This feeling of jumping across timelines led the trio of friends to examine the various ways their lives and relationships have changed over the years and these very discussions have served as a catalyst for their creative process. “Throughout our writing and production period, we weaved in and represented these central themes in our playing – through our arrangements, dynamics, and song titles.”
 
The trio is focused on writing cinematic music with a connection to classical and orchestral music – a new world they’re on a journey to explore together.
 
The First Sounds album artwork is by Olafur Eliasson, an award-winning Icelandic–Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scaled installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. Since 1997, his critically acclaimed solo shows have appeared in major museums around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, SESC Belenzinho and Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo, Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, and the Venice Biennale.

Photo credit: Steven Sebring